| Posted: 06 April 2010 at 9:43am | IP Logged | 3
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Matthew at what point does a concerned group become a mob in your opinion? Do you wait until more violence is the result or do you speak out against it, once violence starts?
Boy, Jodi, you sure do not toss softballs. Honestly, I wish there was a pat easy answer to that one. A clue might be in the qualifications of "more violence" versus "once violence", but to my mind there is an even earlier tipping point.
As Oliver Wendell Holmes famously opined, "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." In that reasonable standard, I believe a group becomes a mob when it starts unreasonably infringing on the rights of others. (I qualify with "unreasonably" to discount such minor infringements like marches that impede my ability to drive down a street for a short period of time.)
Depending on how loose your definition of violence is, I would include threats and physical intimidation into the mix of violence (or at very least a precursor of violence). Slurs and hateful language, unfortunately, would fall short of that mark. While I might personally find it offensive, it is still an expression of free speech.
The great challenge, of course, is figuring out how close to that metaphorical "nose" my proverbial "fist" can come. The extremes -- contact and wide misses -- are obvious. It's the nuances that become much trickier.
I read on digg the right is now saying that Obama is a racist because he is taxing sun tanning and who uses tanning beds, yep white people. Proof positive he is a racist.
There is a slender ray of truth in this. There IS a 10 percent tanning tax being imposed, starting July 1. Like Jack Kemp used to say, "If you want to promote something, subsidize it. If you want to discourage something, tax it." Since there is a presumption that those who fake-n-bake have an increased risk for skin cancer, and national healthcare means we the people would be footing the bill, a tax to discourage the activity seems reasonable.
And thus, I think it's a bit of a stretch to assert the President and his administration are racist because of a tax applied on the melanin-challenged. Sun tanning is a choice, and there is no restriction on your rights prohibiting you or preventing you for partaking in that activity.
It's not like, for instance, the polls in Alabama where back in the day if you were black you had to correctly guess the number of beans in the jar to get your ballot. (And, somehow, no otherwise eligible black voters ever got the right number while the polling station was open...)
Edited by Matthew McCallum on 06 April 2010 at 10:42am
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Topic Closed)
